The next UK general election

The current opinion polls for the next UK general election are a bit unusual: a third party with almost no seats is well out ahead. But the next election is likely several years away. Even if the current polling situation obtained much closer to the election, the parties might at the last minute withdraw some of their candidates as happened in 2019.

Avoiding vote-splitting

The 2019 situation was one where the opinion polls were shifting, and The Brexit Party pulled hundreds of candidates at short notice. This avoided splitting the centre-right / pro-Brexit vote. The move must have thrown dozens of seats to the Conservatives.

The Brexit Party is now called Reform UK and is leading in the polls. Given their history, any threat they make to withdraw their candidates has got to be taken deadly seriously. But they're not leading by a huge amount, nor is their total level of support particularly high. The "lead" in an opinion poll of course contains twice the usual margin of error because it's derived from *two* estimates.

There are now five parties that could win multiple parliamentary seats across England:

• the Liberal Democrats
• the Conservatives
• Labour
• the Greens, and
• Reform UK

In some cases they could do better if they could somehow avoid splitting each other's votes (e.g., Lib Dems standing down to let Labour win, Reform standing down to let in the Conservatives). This can either be done by agreement (you stand down here, we'll stand down over there) or unilaterally as The Brexit Party did in 2019.

These sorts of agreements can potentially go down badly with the electorate, but not always. The mere fact of an agreement might damage one of the parties to it, but there's also the fact that a coalition of parties combines the negatives of all the members: would anyone unreservedly vote for a party that united Diane Abbott, Peter Mandelson and Ed Davey? Or Nigel Farage, Caroline Noakes and Jacob Rees-Mogg?

There's a possibility I wouldn't rule out: shortly before the expected calling of the election, some of the parties will start unilaterally standing down in a handful of seats. If Reform UK stood down in a few unwinnable Tory seats, you might see the Tories stand a few of their candidates down too: but you might *also* see Labour or the Lib Dems do so, for their own protection. So anything could happen, and could happen quickly.

It follows that trying to predict total numbers of seats by party will be difficult given that the parties will likely have a much stronger incentive to stand down candidates suddenly towards the end of this cycle.